In fact even on Wikipedia – something you’d assume was pretty much alphabetical – finding an alphabetical list among the contents isn’t obvious.

What’s the reason for this destruction of alphabetical order – are we losing our way?

Not a bit of it. Alphabetical order is only really relevant to physical mediums like paper – when you have to manually search stuff yourself. When you’ve got a search engine to do it for you you don’t need alphabetical order any more, the machine takes you directly to the page you wanted.

That means there’s a host of opportunity for new orders of things online.

What are you currently ordering alphabetically online that really you don’t need to? Or what are you not ordering that you could?